Free Martha in Paris by Margery Sharp Page A

Eric—“in Paris, isn’t something silly. It’s something serious.”
    â€œAnd how have you found that out?” asked Mr. Joyce.—“The dealers haven’t been after you?” he added anxiously.
    â€œNo,” said Martha. “I haven’t met any dealers. Anyway, I don’t think le maître thinks I’m ready yet, for a show.”
    â€œHeaven forfend,” said Mr. Joyce. (Now they were getting down to brass tacks: two professionals together.) “At least three more years you need, before your first show; and even then perhaps only because I am an old man. If in my senility I ever say ‘show,’ and le maître says not,” said Mr. Joyce, “take his word, not mine.”
    He was the best friend Martha ever had. He also gave her five pounds.
    Martha’s Aunt Dolores, by a peculiar coincidence, gave Martha a very nice powder-compact. It was an additional disappointment to her that three months in Paris had so little improved Martha’s personal appearance. Whatever Martha wore still looked like a pup-tent; no trace of make-up—after three months in Paris!—civilized her broad, bucolic countenance. “You might just as well never have gone to Paris at all,” cried Dolores despairingly, “for all the change it’s made in you!”
    In this she was wrong. Actually Martha herself wasn’t yet entirely sure what change Paris (and life without the capital) had made in her. There were certain physical signs and warnings; like many another young woman in her situation, Martha contrived to ignore them. She quite definitely preferred not to remember Eric Taylor, with whom, to be frank, she now regretted all intercourse.
    The Christmas holiday at Richmond passed off well enough, though towards its end Martha began to feel extremely bored. She had determined, and Mr. Joyce agreed with the decision, to give both eye and hand a complete rest; but for Martha to keep off drawing was as hard as for an alcoholic to keep off the bottle, and she was in fact so glad when the day came for her to return to Paris, she showed it.
    â€œOh, Martha,” cried Dolores reproachfully, “aren’t you going to miss me at all? ”
    To be frank, Martha wasn’t. She couldn’t even pretend she was—hypocrisy being one of the many polite virtues she had never wasted energy in acquiring. But she let Dolores kiss her, and shook hands with Harry Gibson, before turning with relief to Mr. Joyce, whose flat contribution to the farewells had been a suggestion that she was now capable of taking a taxi to the station alone.
    â€œAs she is now capable of making the whole journey alone,” said Mr. Joyce—an eye on Dolores.
    â€œWell, of course,” said Martha. “Good-bye.”

Chapter Ten
    The flat in the rue de Vaugirard seemed almost like home. Martha, dumping her suit-case in the hall, sniffed its familiar, distinctive odour of floor-polish and French cooking with pleasure. Across the dinner-table, the little clothes-peg head of Madame Dubois, the long bony countenance of Angèle, were objects as pleasingly familiar as might have been a pair of china dogs on a mantelpiece. And Madame Dubois and Angèle, after their breather, seemed glad to see Martha too: Angèle having missed her only source of vicarious romance, and Madame Dubois having missed Martha’s pension …
    â€œNo doubt Mr. Joyce made many enquiries, about our little ménage? ” suggested Madame Dubois.—It was a point on which she felt some anxiety. Those evenings she’d permitted Martha to sit with Mrs. Taylor still weighed on her; her own very pretty Christmas-card addressed to Martha’s patron had been answered, late, by one obviously designed for colleagues in the fur-trade: Madame Dubois very much hoped that nothing had been said at Richmond to reflect on her discharge of duty. Martha’s cheerful reply that no, Mr. Joyce